It began as an afterthought. It evolved into a journalistic tradition. Today it’s an American institution with global resonance. TIME’s selection of the Person of the Year highlights the powerful personalities who shape our world in ways both creative and destructive. Starting in 1927–when the editors invented the concept to make up for not running a cover story on Charles Lindbergh after his transatlantic flight–the choices have formed a fascinating reflection of history in the making. The public has joined in the process, passionately suggesting candidates and just as passionately debating the selections. Now people can experience the entire POY heritage through a multimedia exhibition, “TIME’s Person of the Year at 75,” which will open in New York City in the spring and tour eight other U.S. cities over the next two years. Turn to the following pages for a sampling of the absorbing, inspiring and provocative figures featured in the exhibition.
1927 CHARLES LINDBERGH
Lindbergh was just 25, with a mere five years of flying behind him, when in May 1927 he became the first pilot to complete a nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic. The audacious feat made him a national hero–the recipient of euphoric parades, a Congressional Medal of Honor and a posting as a roving ambassador of goodwill. TIME called him “the most cherished citizen since Theodore Roosevelt.” He completed his annus mirabilis by meeting Anne Morrow, whom he would marry in 1929. They would seek privacy, especially after their son was notoriously kidnapped and murdered in 1932, but both would remain lifelong celebrities–she as an author, he as a continuing aviation pioneer, an inventor who contributed to the artificial heart, an airline consultant and an advocate of sometimes controversial political views.
1930 MOHANDAS GANDHI
“Curiously, it was in a jail that the year’s end found the little half-naked brown man whose 1930 mark on world history will undoubtedly loom largest of all.” Thus TIME described Mohandas Gandhi, in prison for mobilizing Indians against the British raj. A believer in “passive resistance” who had a steely will, a monklike ascetic who was a London-trained lawyer and a sophisticated politician, Gandhi gave Indians a proud identity and sense of nationhood. Many venerated him as a mahatma (great soul). His protests in 1930 presaged the moment in 1947 when Britain would grant India independence and Gandhi would achieve worldwide status as a moral icon. His example lives on in nonviolent activists of our day such as Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela.
1932 FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
Roosevelt was named Person of the Year three times. The first designation was not so much for any accomplishments as for the hope he inspired as the new President of a Depression-ridden nation–and for his determination and courage in overcoming the effects of polio. His subsequent selections, though, more than ratified his initial distinction. In 1934 he was cited for showing the U.S. the way out of “a deep, dark economic hole.” And in 1941, during the daunting, early days of World War II, TIME selected F.D.R. because “the country he leads stands for the hopes of the world.”
1936 WALLIS SIMPSON
Simpson was the first woman named Person of the Year (she would be followed by, among others, Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 and Philippine President Corazon Aquino in 1986). A twice-divorced American socialite, she was, to Britain’s King Edward VIII, “the woman I love,” for whom he abdicated the throne in a saga that shook the monarchy. Their love was deep, but their long, resplendent exile as Duke and Duchess of Windsor struck some as arid and irrelevant. Still, when the King announced his decision, she was, as TIME wrote, “the most talked-about, written-about, headlined and interest-compelling person in the world.”
1962 POPE JOHN XXIII
The 1960s were a decade of upheaval and renewal, and if Angelo Roncalli–the Italian farmer’s son who had become Pope at the age of 76–had anything to say about it, the 900-million-member Roman Catholic Church would be no exception. Pope John convened the ecumenical council called Vatican II. Its purpose: to bring the church into line with modern science, economics, morals and politics and to end the division that had dissipated the Christian message for centuries. In doing so, TIME wrote, he “set in motion ideas and forces that will affect not merely Roman Catholics, not only Christians, but the whole world’s ever expanding population.”
1963 MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
Preacher, activist, follower of Gandhi’s principles of nonviolent resistance, King had emerged as the champion of American blacks’ crusade for civil rights. A veteran of the Montgomery, Ala., bus protests of the 1950s and the Southern sit-ins of the ’60s, King came to the fore in the 1963 Birmingham, Ala., demonstrations for desegregation. In the same year he led 200,000 in the March on Washington and gave the galvanizing “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. “He articulates the longings, the hopes, the aspirations of his people,” said his colleague the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. King went on in 1964 to win the Nobel Peace Prize and to see the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act passed. But the price he had always paid for his nonviolent leadership was violence. He was repeatedly assaulted, his home bombed. In 1968 he paid the ultimate price: he was assassinated on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tenn., by James Earl Ray.
1975 AMERICAN WOMEN
Starting with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, contemporary feminism–women’s lib–had been a newly surging social current in America. Riding its crest were such vivid provocateurs as Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug. But by 1975, TIME argued, feminism had “transcended the feminist movement” and penetrated every layer of society. The idea of equal social and professional rights for women, “once the doctrine of well-educated middle-class women,” had “taken hold among working-class women, farm wives, blacks, Puerto Ricans, white ‘ethnics.’” The drama of the sexes remained, TIME cautioned–“the Old Adam and the New Eve.” But “enough U.S. women have so deliberately taken possession of their lives that the event is spiritually equivalent to the discovery of a new continent.”
1979 AYATULLAH KHOMEINI
The Person of the Year is the one who, for better or for worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year. But when Ayatullah Khomeini was chosen, many readers could not accept the “or worse” provision. Khomeini’s fundamentalist Islamic revolution overthrew the Shah of Iran and gripped the nation in a despotic, anti-Western regime. With his blessing, militants held 52 Americans hostage for months. TIME received 5,200 letters–far more than for any other Person of the Year–most of them protesting the selection.
1981 LECH WALESA
Sometimes when a humble man steps into history’s spotlight, he is transformed, and history with him. So it was when Lech Walesa, an unemployed electrician from the shipyards in Gdansk, Poland, formed the labor union Solidarity and led its struggle against the country’s repressive communist government, demanding a series of democratic reforms. The regime at first made concessions and then cracked down harshly, arresting Walesa and outlawing Solidarity. But the movement could not be stifled, nor could Walesa. By the end of the ’80s the government would collapse and Walesa would be elected President of Poland.
1982 THE COMPUTER
Having chosen men, women, couples and groups of the year, TIME in 1982 named a machine, the computer. (It would take similar liberties with the formula in 1988, hailing the endangered Earth as Planet of the Year.) The computer had long been a fixture in modern life, but the advent of the personal computer made the “desktop revolution” accessible to millions. TIME’s story predicted that home computers would someday be as commonplace as TV sets or dishwashers. Twenty years later, with 60% of the U.S. wired, that is well on the way to coming true. The story also foresaw “dramatic changes in the way people live and work, perhaps even in the way they think. America will never be the same.” Right again.
1987 MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
Gorby. Glasnost. Perestroika. Those quaint, inseparable terms entered the global lexicon in the 1980s as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed a new glasnost (openness) in Soviet society and began implementing perestroika (restructuring) in its economy and politics. He sought a more conciliatory relationship with the U.S., negotiating arms reductions. With a Western-style politician’s charm and homey touch, he became, as TIME put it, “a symbol of hope for a new kind of Soviet Union: more open, more concerned with the welfare of its citizens and less with the spread of its ideology and system abroad.” What did spread, at home and abroad, was a fever of democratic reform. Soviet satellite states gained independence. The Berlin Wall fell. The cold war faded. The ferment grew chaotic and eventually swept away Gorbachev and the Soviet Union. But for surviving so long and so boldly and imaginatively as “the patron of change,” Gorbachev was again TIME’s choice in 1989, this time as the Person of the Decade.